Nightmare

[roselightfairy]

Another bite-sized snippet of extremely overwrought angst, for the Whumptober “alt” Day 10 prompt, nightmare.

~300 words, Legolas/Gimli, past character death.

In his dreams, he is almost happy.

He cannot revisit these memories during the day, not if he is to try – as his family bids him, as Gimli bade him with his last breath – to stay with them, for them, to find some new semblance of life out of the shambles left to him. But at night, when he drifts into reverie, he steps just far enough away from the world that he does not remember the falseness of the comfort, and he lets himself remember.

He falls into his memories and he lives them again: dancing, laughing in the spacious caverns of Aglarond, with torchlight reflecting off the facets of gem-walls; late evenings around a fire in Ithilien, Gimli dozing off with his head in Legolas’s lap. Sunrise walks along the beach near their home here; flicking salt water at Gimli when he made jests at Legolas’s expense and laughing when he sputtered.

Or sometimes he chooses to follow the dream-path along memories of their nights together: Gimli’s hands on his body, awakening fire beneath his skin and in his soul. He remembers when their love was young and Aglarond not yet built, Gimli drawing him down into a private corner to make it their own; remembers laying his love out in sun-dappled forest, beneath the trees of new-made Ithilien.

They are the sweetest dreams, and the cruelest – because always, inevitably, the memory grows stale as it winds to its end, and he is borne into waking with the knowledge that it is only an echo, but a mirror, as Gimli said once. However sweet the memory, the sharpest pain comes at its end – at the knowledge that there will be no more to make, nothing new. All he has is inside him already – and it is only in dreaming that he forgets that it is not new.

But when it ends, he must wake – and return to the nightmare of his life.